The Alfresco community as a whole does not work like it should for me. I would like to have a community where people collaborate and help each other. I rarely see this happen in the Alfresco world. This post summarizes why I think the things are like they are and where we stand.
Community Size
First and foremost, the community is small. I don’t have numbers, but it is definitely a very different scale compared to skyrocketing Open Source projects such as WordPress, Rails or the Spring Framework. That is due Alfresco’s nature of a content platform. Everybody – big and small – wants a kick ass website. But only some people realize the need for a content-platform and are willing to work on one.
Of those people working with Alfresco, it is only a very small fraction which I consider passionate and engaged. I think this is normal. In the Alfresco world, I would estimate that number less than fifty people worldwide. I am not saying they are worse than others in this regard. Fifty engaged people can still do a lot you may say. True, but only if interests converge. And that’s where it gets difficult.
Disagreement in the Community
Let’s take the maven SDK (which I consider moving slowly for years) as example. Every serious developer has a need to build his extensions, so there should be demand for this kind of tooling. I have personally been using it since its early days. But there are two things I don’t like about it. AMP-files and now tomcat (instead of jetty). I do not want to pick up the discussion again so I am working with my fork of the code.
I generally have a demand for better tooling support. At Alfresco, they see tooling could be improved, but it is not a priority. In fact, I would already be happy if they fix issues such as ALF-13631 (which is a pain in the ass). I doubt we will ever see this happen and I have accepted that.
On top of that, I am amazed to see strong difference in developer mindset. I want good support for discovery and a super fast feedback loop while hacking on code. Seems there are other people who want to read books in advance and also comfortable while waiting for compilation and server restarts. ;)
And honestly, I also don’t see interest convergence while looking at Jan’s recent post about the future of the community.
Fixing the Community
The situation looks like a chicken and egg problem to me. If we want the community to grow, somebody has to start making an investment. If we want Alfresco to support us, we need to come up with a clear voice. If Alfresco wants to build up a healthy ecosystem (including a healthy community), they need to support our needs. These are my personal takeaways from the Google+ Hangout I kicked off recently.
I still think that a Hangout is an invaluable tool to work things out because it supports fast feedback via video and audio and physical location of the participants does not matter. I will try kicking off another more focused one – even if that means we will be less people.
Alfresco recognizes collaboration with the community could be better. I am curious whether we will see them signalling the aim to improve that.
Feel free to drop your thoughts.
Update Mon Aug 18: Make sure to check out these recent news!
Andreas,
I agree that there are improvements to be made in the Alfresco community. But I feel like you’ve made some broad generalizations here that lack specifics. If you elaborate on some of these points I think it would help further the discussion.
For example, you say, “I would like to have a community where people collaborate and help each other. I rarely see this happen in the Alfresco world.” I see this happen every single day in the forums, on IRC, and on StackExchange, where you are one of the top collaborators. So I must be missing your point.
Saying the community is “small” is a relative term. I agree that it is not as big as the other projects you mentioned, and I also think your estimate of the number of passionately engaged community members is probably on the small side, but that’s because we probably have differing opinions on what an engaged community member looks like.
Whether it is super tiny, small, medium, or huge, what is the point? Do you wish it were smaller? Larger? Maybe you are saying that, despite its relatively small size, it is not moving in a single direction? I do agree that getting everyone to all work together is a challenge, particularly when there are multiple paths that could be taken for any given issue. I suspect that the community is so diverse it is unlikely you will ever get unanimous consensus on one issue, and therefore it is best to get a subset of the people who are most passionate about that particular issue and move forward.
I agree with you that developer tooling seems to not be a priority. It gets no mention on the roadmap that was recently updated. I think this is a huge problem. Because Alfresco is commercial open source you’ll either need paying customers to tell product management it is important, or the community will need to solve it in a high quality way and contribute it.
So I’d like to encourage you and anyone else who thinks the Alfresco community is broken to present concrete specifics about what the problems are and a proposed solution or two for each of the problems.
I respect you and your opinion, and you are free to express it as you wish, but as a member of the minority of passionate community members, you have the power to constructively move the conversation forward if you offer specifics.
Jeff
Hi Jeff,
sure, what we see on IRC, the forums and StackOverflow can be seen as collaboration where people help each other out. But that is not what I have in mind.
In all the years, I cannot recall a single community effort getting traction. And I don’t think focus is the biggest issue. ALF-13631 is very focused and as old as the product. I think the bigger problem is that people do not join forces. And that situation is there for a reason.
It’s quite common that alpha geeks kick off an effort and others join in. But I wouldn’t call the current environment very attractive for such people. I always thought that growing up an ecosystem was one of Alfresco’s goals. Of course I do realize that at the end of the day, making a living is what matters most.
As said in the post, I will try establishing another more focused Hangout… when I am back from vacation.
Thanks for commenting
Andreas
Hi Andreas,
I just found your post and I’d like to invite you to participate in the discussions we are having at the Order of the Bee… http://orderofthebee.github.io/
This is all work in progress, but the goal is to join forces to get the Alfresco community organized and increase collaboration. In the “Contact us” section you’ll find a link to the mailing list, but you can also join the IRC channel where we mostly gather.
The first goal is to define a good set of questions for Alfresco’s CEO during the next Office Hours (August 15th), and then move towards an in person meeting at the Alfresco Summit.
cheers
Boriss
Hi Boriss,
I am already following the discussion on the mailing list. In fact, I wrote the latest message.
Nevertheless, the OOTB is still worth the mention here.
regards
Andreas
Yes! I’m glad you joined! I had lunch with Cristina, another member of OOTB, and she mentioned you were already in the mailing list, so I went to check that out and I saw your message.
Looking forward to the collaboration.
cheers
Boriss